Slideshow: Long Beach Grand Prix

More than 200,000 spectators lined the downtown streets of Long Beach, Calif., in April as 26 drivers battled for dominance in the 2012 IndyCar circuit.

The Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach -- third in this year's IndyCar Series -- drew the biggest names in the sport, including Team Penske, Andretti Autosport, A.J. Foyt Enterprises, Chip Ganassi Racing, and KV Racing Technology, among others. In this year's race, won by driver Will Power of Team Penske, the vehicles averaged 88mph over a 167-mile distance.

And if you've always dreamed of hanging with the pit crew at Indy, your opportunity has arrived. Littelfuse Inc. is sponsoring the Speed2Design contest that enables its winners to attend the race, visit the pits, and talk engineer-to-engineer with crew members.

In the meantime, Design News presents photos of the Long Beach event, courtesy of KV Racing and co-sponsors Littelfuse Inc. and Mouser Electronics. KV's car, driven by Tony Kanaan, finished fourth on the two-mile street circuit, improving 15 positions after starting at 19th.

Click the image below, and start your virtual engines!

Street circuits like those at Long Beach use multiple road surfaces, including concrete and asphalt, which put extra demands on the vehicle's suspension and tires, as well as on the driver. (Source: Littelfuse)

Where to enter:

Click on the link to access the page with the entry form for the
Speed2Design contest.

Indy racing is not for the fain-of-heart. The costs are incredible and the stakes are high. There has never been an all encompasing document that cannot be interpreted more than one way. As long as there are creative engineers and lawyers, the rules will be interpreted and bent as much as possible in order to gain a slight advantage. The people racing in the Indy League are some of the most competitive people you'll ever meet and without a "standard" engine and chassis, every team would spend whatever is necessary to win. The use of 200 or more channels of telemetry to monitor all aspects of car, engine and driver performance provides an opportunity for the engineers to make minor tweaks between races that may (or not) improve one aspect of a cars performance in the next race (assuming the air temperature, tire compound, humidity, wind, barometric pressure, time of the day and phase of the moon are within the predicted range). The fact that outsiders are able to be in the pit area and observe the team in order to report in this forum is remarkable. Keep up the good work.

My comment about cheating in sports is the old saying, "hate the sport, not the player". All organized and professional sports have rules, rules sometimes get broken, some detected, others not, punishments levied according to the rules and the organization.

Charles, the way I understand it is the rules are governed by two things. The races must be (1) kept close to keep fan excitement/loyalty and (2) safe but, with enough preceived danger (and crashes) to entertain the crowd. The bottom line is money, of course.

Your right though, this used to be where the car companies showed of their wares in true competition. Now if some company gets too strong, they make new rules to rein it in. It's no longer FAIR to win too consistenty.

Makes you wonder, ChasChas, if they're doing the right thing by using such confining rules. Maybe it would discourage cheating if they went back to the era when the choice of engine or chassis was more open.

Almost every good inside story from racing is how they cheated, won, and got away with it. Many racers say that you must cheat to win. They find ways to "cheat within the rules" (it passed inspection somehow) and then they are called tactics.

I'm sure Kanaan is checking the data to see how well a new "cheat" is working out.

Kanaan was likely looking at the data and trying to see opportunities to improve his lap times. Things that he likely was observing were cornering G forces, steering angle, braking G forces, wheelspin, rev limiter application, rpm & gearing....all specific to critical segments of the course. He is looking for hundreths of a second anywhere possible.

Never fear you comments about the new IndyCar design is true. The "more closed" wheel version will appear on the Ovals.Up until now all tracks have been city circuits or race tracks. Watch out at Indy for a different looking car and these will appear on all the Ovals. That livery on the Mouser car looks great. Go Tony Kanaan

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.